Book the Writer

Kalman

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – May 17, 1999

Tibor Kalman

Remembering a Renaissance human

by Kurt andersen

TWO YEARS AGO, the historian Daniel Boorstin, who was then eightytwo, delivered a lecture to an audience of young computer experts, entertainment experts, and design experts. The talk celebrated what Boorstin called “the amateur spirit.”

According to Boorstin, “The rewards and refreshments of thought and the arts come from the courage to try something, all sorts of things, for the first time. An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of ruts he has never been trained in. . . . In the long run, the ruts wear away, and adventuring amateurs reward us by a wonderful vagrancy into the unexpected.”

Today, Boorstin’s words read like an epitaph for a man who happened to have attended that 1997 lecture. Tibor Kalman, who perfectly embodied that brave, ferocious, bighearted amateur spirit, died last week of cancer.

Tibor, whom everyone called Tibor (partly, I think, because it’s a fun word to say—his son’s middle name, after all, is Onomatopoeia), was not yet fifty. Nevertheless, he managed to distinguish himself in more careers in twenty-five years than any dozen other people do in fifty. The Tibor Kalman aesthetic DNA lives and flourishes all over the place, in the work of his former protégés and of people he influenced but never met.

His nominal job description was graphic designer, and his legendary design firm, M&Co, was a truly communistic entity— a collective filled with subversive spirit and run by a charismatic, sometimes infuriating dictator. (This isn’t just metaphorical: although his parents escaped Communist Hungary in 1956, when Tibor was seven, more than a decade later he joined S.D.S., and until he died he remained a kind of Yippie-ish, Euro-style socialist.) Although he had no formal design training, he was the art director of Artforum and of Interview—yet it was the M&Co ideas that became so influential, the most important of those ideas being a kind of impudent, life-affirming irony. In the eighties, he and M&Co helped transform the palette of sophisticated design by incorporating charmingly unsophisticated images and typefaces—sometimes faux-naïf ones, as with the retro menus and matchbooks they designed for the Manhattan diner Florent, and sometimes the real thing, as with the primitive Howard Finster painting they put on the cover of “Little Creatures,” by the Talking Heads.

Tibor also became an influential product designer. His brand of humor and outrageousness (combined, winningly, with an almost neoclassical Jack Benny restraint) were even rarer in industrial design than in graphics, and the famous M&Co wristwatches and clock faces with randomly ordered numbers still sell all over the world. “A little fucked up” was to him a prime aesthetic virtue.

Then he became an influential filmmaker, creating a music video and a film-credit sequence and a TV ad that pioneered the use of animated type. After that, he became an influential conjurer of three-dimensional places as well: as part of the official Times Square redevelopment effort, it was his vision of the neighborhood—an energetic jumble of hyperbolic signs and shops, an authentic renaissance of the raucous spirit of the place—that, a decade ago, finally won out over the prettier, well-behaved corporate visions. And, finally, in the nineties, he became an editor, creating the quixotic, smart, photo-driven magazine Colors, for Benetton.

Tibor turned his professional life into an obstacle course, a risky, highspirited game of perpetual amateurism in the best Boorstinian sense. Last spring, I spent hours talking with him for the afterword of a book about his work (“Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist”; Princeton Architectural Press, 1998). “The smartest way to work is to not quite know what you’re doing,” he told me. “I’ve done two commercials in my life; I don’t want to do three. I did two of a number of things. The first one, you fuck it up in an interesting way; the second one, you get it right; and then you’re out of there. If you keep changing occupations, keep changing projects, you can attain a kind of incredible ecstasy of learning.”

He wasn’t finished. “I’d like to make Channel 13 documentaries, one about bike messengers. I’ve always wanted to make products carry messages that were beyond a logo. A museum of contemporary anthropology—that’s an example of something I’d love to do. I don’t understand why there couldn’t be a three-dimensional kind of literary museum.”